Despite the unveiling of the 13-inch Retina MacBook, I’m still interested in extending the life of my good ’ole white MacBook. Partially just because I’d like to see how far I can push it, partially because I’m not really home hacking enough to justify the purchase, and mostly cause I’m currently in a thrifty phase. An article from ArsTechnica captures where I’m at:
Given that everything else is already maxed out, we wanted to upgrade to an SSD in order to squeeze a bit more life out of this laptop. If you have an older computer that already has the maximum RAM but still uses a hard drive, and you’re not in the market for a new computer anytime soon, you can give it a boost with an SSD upgrade.
Prices have come down significantly since the article posted last year. You can get 512 Gb of SSD storage for 400 bucks. On top of that you can replace the optical drive with a 1 Tb HDD for a total of $150. So for less than a Mac Mini, or 25% of the dream MacBook, I could probably get at least another year to year and a half out of my MacBook. Nice!
Too bad you can’t processor upgrade these things.